Photographer Herb Greene, who shot many of the biggest bands of the Bay Area before, during, and after the Summer of Love, has died, age 82.
His photos captured many sides of his subjects, some of the photos becoming iconic, such as the one that comprised the cover for Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow LP.
Cover for Archie no. 50 (1951) by co-creator Bob Montana
‘50s Archie was more like the men’s-humor magazines of its time, at least vis-à-vis the renderings of Betty and Veronica.
There are two parodies of Archie that are noteworthy, though one was out of the public eye for decades. There’s “Starchie,” the classic parody scripted by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by Will Elder for Mad #12, June 1954:
And there’s a later one, done, again, by Kurtzman/Elder, for the Goodman Beaver strip in Help! magazine, which Kurtzman edited after leaving Mad and working on two short-lived magazines, Trump and Humbug.
More pointed than the original parody in Mad, this version provoked the ire of Archie Comics, which sued Warren Publications, publishers of Help!, not once, but twice, resulting, first, in a small cash payment and a published note of apology, then in transfer of the copyright to the story to Archie Comics, which refused to allow the story to be reprinted for years. When, in the early Aughts, Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth noticed that Archie Comics had not renewed the copyright, it ran in The Comics Journal:
Both version feature Elder’s trademark “schmaltz,” the numerous little background jokes and bits completely irrelevant to the story. Here’s just the splash panel:
Philip Barry’s play, “The Philadelphia Story,” starring Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotten, Van Heflin, and Shirley Booth, premiered at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway #OnThisDay in 1939.
What a cast. Hepburn as Tracy Lord, Cotten as C.K. Dexter Haven, Heflin as Macaulay Connor, and Booth as Liz Imbrie.
“His pet aversion (ask him and see!) is ‘painted lips’.” I’ll guess that that conversation, in the unlikely event that it ever transpired, yielded pet aversions that were a parsec or so from “painted lips.”
“Professional beggars.” This was, apparently, an issue in NYC at the time. The New Yorker published an article in May of that year titled “The Beggars Are Coming,” which looked at, among other questions, the number of “professional beggars” in the city.
